Lady Gaga attended, even if only briefly, the Tisch School of the Arts. So, yes, even Lady Gaga had to fill out the Common Application and do the NYU supplement. The college application ritual is a rite of passage for almost 70% of high school seniors.

I imagine if you are a computer programmer, you are secretly longing for the end of 2013. It's been a bad year for their field. The Common Application. Healthcare.gov. Walmart-Online on BlackFriday. Now, Fordham University. I give a D- to those who know C++. I feel so sorry for the thousands of high school seniors who received, mistakenly, emails from Fordham's Student Aid Services congratulating them on their acceptance to Fordham only to find they were victims of just another 'glitch' in our cyber-punk'd world. I know that in writing blogs, I drop a letter or transpose a number occasionally and that spell check is of no help when I mean 'bare' but I write 'bear'. Perhaps misplacing a 1 or a 0 in a million lines of code is the programmer's equivalent of a grammatical error. But, OMG, programming errors wreak havoc on whole swaths of society. This application season, students using CA4 weren't 100% certain if their well-crafted & painstakingly edited essays maintained formatting after pressing submit; there was no box to check if your ethnicity was Hispanic; uploads were agonizingly slow; payments were not applied. And, after today's false acceptances from Fordham, my confidence in cyber techies has been sorely tested. Here's hoping 2014 finds programmers with a renewed attention to detail.